Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Evangeline
I am to be married.
Father told me at breakfast, between the post and his second cup, in the manner of a man relaying a decision about the roof.
Charles Fairchild. The spring, most likely, or the early summer if his mother’s health continues poorly.
There were terms, which he did not explain, and there was a settlement, which he mentioned twice.
He seemed pleased. He asked whether I had any objection and had already turned back to his correspondence before the question finished leaving him.
I said it was a good match.
It is a good match. I have said the words several times since and they remain true each time, which is how I know they are the wrong words.
I have met Mr. Fairchild once, at the Ashworths’, for the length of time it takes to be introduced and to say something about the weather.
I remember that he is tall and that his coat was very fine.
I remember nothing he said. I am not certain he said anything to me directly, and I have been turning the evening over all afternoon trying to recall whether I answered a question or only smiled, and I cannot produce the memory, which suggests it was the second.
That is the man. Seven months. I have seven months to learn the rest of him.
Mother came up after and sat on the edge of the bed and told me I was fortunate, and she is right, and I let her tell me.
She said that affection follows. She said her own marriage began as an arrangement between two men over a ledger and that she came to love my father in time, and I believe her, and I did not say the thing I was thinking, which was: how long did it take.
She would have answered honestly. That is the trouble with my mother. She would have said four years, or seven, or never, and then we would both have had to sit with it, and she would have gone down to dinner carrying something she has spent thirty years setting down carefully.
So I said I was fortunate, and she kissed my forehead, and we were both spared.
I walked down to the harbor after, which I know I should not do alone, and which I have done twice a week since I was fifteen.
The Haven boat was in. I did not go and speak to him. I stood at the end of the north pier with my hands in my coat and watched three men unload crates in the wind, and one of them was Thomas, and I have known that for the whole of this entry and have taken four pages to arrive at it.
He did not see me. Or he saw me and understood that I was not there to be seen, which is likelier, because he has always understood that sort of thing without instruction.
I thought: I could go down there.
I thought: and say what.
There is nothing to say. He has no money and no name and no prospect of either, and a fisherman does not marry a Merrick, and I have known this since I was seventeen years old and first noticed that I looked forward to Thursdays.
It was never a thing that could happen. Nothing has changed today.
Father’s announcement altered nothing at all except that it has made permanent a fact that was already permanent, and I am unable to explain why that should be the difference.
But it is the difference. Something closed this morning over the breakfast things, and I have been walking around all day trying to find where.
I will be a good wife to Charles Fairchild.
I will learn what he takes in his tea and what he thinks about the tariff and which of his relations must be flattered.
I will run his house better than his mother runs hers.
I am well suited to this. I have been trained for it the way a horse is trained, patiently and from a great distance, and I will do it well and no one will ever have cause to say otherwise.
And every Thursday for the rest of my life, at four o’clock in the afternoon, I will think about the north pier.
That is not disloyalty. It is only weather. It will pass over, and I will stand in it, and no one will know it is raining.